Retro Club - 8 & 16-bit puzzlers - The Bear and Badger

Moot_Geeza

Not yet, I've been on death's door. Will check it out tonight.

Moot_Geeza

Turns out I don't have it on my ROM set. Will go back to the SNES one for now, see if I can get off the train.

Moot_Geeza

Right, I'm off the train now. It's not a complete stinker but it has very little going for it. Second boss was bad but miles better than the first.

I'm using a video guide and because I can't help myself I think I'm going to stick with it...

Moot_Geeza

It's amusing how little chance I'd have of working some of this stuff out myself. It's occasionally obvious where to use the bells, but it all seems necessary for progression but some of them are U WOT. Different times. Not hating it, probably because I'm not letting myself die thanks to save states and the spinny thing that I assume disappears when you die is still whizzing around the screen hitting things for me.

Moot_Geeza

I finished it. There's not much point adding more but I'll do a quick write up tomorrow. It's a 67% sort of game that has no real equivalent in modern metrics. If it landed in JonB's inbox as a new retro inspired experience I expect he'd struggle to justify anything higher than a [2]. Time is ruthlessly unkind to this sort of thing, but it wouldn't have been considered a turd at the time.

Watched a bit of the sequel on Youtube and it looks like someone accidentally mushed up a prize winning poop by trying to stand a wooden spoon in it. There's no way it's not awful.

Moot_Geeza

The First Samurai - SNES

Serviceable hack 'n slash platformer that would've just about passed muster on the Amiga in '91 but must've been shuffling its feet a bit on SNES in '93. It does some MODE 7 stuff here and there, which I presume was added to the port, and the so-bad-it's-good sampled speech remains, but it's miles behind the standards set by, say, Actraiser or Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts. The levels insist that you collect certain items scattered around the stage to unlock passage to the boss, and the warp pots make it slightly different to most similar games. Many of these items are hidden in places that require a magic spell to be cast in a certain spot, and even following a Youtube walkthrough I was scratching my head with half of them. Plenty of the solutions just seemed like a bit of a stretch. At the time I presume it was lauded for trying something a little different, but in hindsight the format is a massive ballache and drains the fun out of the whole thing. And being honest it wouldn't be much cop as a straight left to right jobbie. It gives you an energy bar - and a second one tucked behind the first, interestingly - where you lose your [on no, my] sword and have to rely on fists. 'Interesting' doesn't always equate to good though, and that's kind of annoying too, so I mostly pushed through spamming save states without allowing myself to get hit much. As was often the case with energy bar games as opposed to one hit pops types, it lacks any real finesse and you'll find things chipping away at your health in a multitude of annoying ways. The bosses are particularly bothersome as the controls aren't really tight enough to put a plan into practice without energy sapping trade-offs, so even expert runs on Youtube seem to consist of a standoffish approach to guardians followed by a Leeroy spam attack once they've taken a few measured hits. The plot is nonsense, so it gains a few percent, but it's not something I could recommend to anyone these days. 56%.

davyK

That score is pretty spot on from how I remember it. It was a case of "it could have really good" but just missed a of tech finesse and level polish.

Moot_Geeza

Are we ready to move on?

retroking1981

Second Samurai (MD)

Utter pish, makes the first game look like a master piece.

1/5

My Reviews

retroking1981

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Are we ready to move on?

Yes

Moot_Geeza

Any shouts for the next game?

retroking1981

DF retro just put up a great video on the Super Star War Trilogy:

https://youtu.be/WuyLHrn2nN8

The video actually goes much deeper into SW games than just the three SNES games, well worth a watch for fans.

The long and short of the SNES games is that Empire is the weakest of the three.

I'm up for one of them, played them quite a bit back in the day but never picked them up until the early 2000's.

Moot_Geeza

Okay, I'll just do a catch-all Star Wars thing.

retroking1981

Just entered the Death Star in Super Star Wars.

Anyone playing anything?

davyK

I've only played Super Star Wars in that series. I hated that first level. It just went on and on and on. It put me off and I gave the cart to my nephew.

retroking1981

Yeah it's definitely no Contra, but it is decent in it's own way. I'll elaborate more in my review.

monkey

I tried Super Star Wars a few months back. Made it to the sandcrawler and packed it in. Too annoying. That trilogy improves a fair bit though iirc. Always used to enjoy them.

davyK

Technically splendid series though. They look and sound great. They control well too. It was the level design that ultimately put me off.

Moot_Geeza

Haven't fancied the SNES ones yet but I did play a chunk of the main mode in Star Wars Arcade (32X). I was expecting it to be utterly awful, and I suppose it is in many ways, but I didn't hate it. I owned it at the time, back when oh wow, polygons felt more important than oh wow, a good game, and it did the job on some levels. I always liked it anyway, managed to finish it in '95 using the odd tactic of selecting two player mode, covering player 1's crosshair with player 2's, putting the pad on the floor and repeatedly pressing the fire button with my toe while I played it with the other pad. This gave me just enough firepower to get through the trickier sections. #Rollsafe

It's a scaled down Model One port and even though it was part of the disaster period for Sega I've still got a soft spot for it.

davyK

The only Star Wars game I ever really enjoyed was the old original Atari arcade game. I usually stay away from licenced games released for home.

The old PC Xwing v TIE fighter is supposed to be a good one.

retroking1981

Super Star Wars (SNES)

Considering the state of movie tie-in games in the early 90s, this is phenomenal, but thats compared to shite like Terminator 2 and Home Alone.

The first thing most people will notice is the brutal difficulty, but once you realise enemies constantly respawn and all drop health you shouldn't die too much from combat, especially considering enemies also drop health and weapon upgrades.

The trick is to treat the game more like a walk and gun rather than a run and gun, there is a time limit to keep an eye out for but this was never an issue for me during my playthrough.

There are a few mode 7 levels in the game using both the Landspeeder on Tatooine and the X-Wing on the Battle of Yavin, the game also switches to a cockpit view for the final run on the Death Star. Whilst it changes things up from the standard platform sections, they're not particularly great and are just kind of there.

You also unlock Han Solo and Chewie on your travels, but they don't really add anything. In fact, by that stage in the game you have acquired Lukes Lightsaber, so there's no reason to pick the the other two who only have a standard blaster.

The big bugbear comes with cheap deaths, a few leaps of faith, getting squashed by pillars and being pushed down a pit by oncoming enemies to name a few. Thankfully they're infrequent enough not to completely ruin the experience.

The presentation and sound are superb, and like I said ealier it's a great movie tie-in for the time, but compared to something like Contra III which came out slightly earlier in 1992, its a bit rough and unpolished.

Good, not great.

3/5

My Reviews

davyK

Yup.

Time_on_my_hands

Good review. I must give this series another go - they look great but there's definitely a 'correct' way to play unless you want a really tough time.

Moot_Geeza

Will pick another SW game and have a dabble this evening. Retro's review sounds about right to me, it always looked good but was definitely outside of the welljel zone when I eyed up the other side of the fence as an exclusively Sega gamer.

retroking1981

Rock N' Roll Racing (SNES)

Was gonna pick up the Blizzard Collection to play this, but then thought sod it, and just booted up the ROM on the SNES mini.

This has actually aged quite well imo. The controls are nice and responsive, it looks the part and the chip tune renditions of classic rock tracks never get dull surprisingly, despite there only being a handful on rotation.

The only real issues I have is the difficulty is a bit unbalanced, and it can drag in places.

It starts off really easy and then gets quite tough as you have to juggle buying new vehicles and upgrading them with your winnings.

Once you have accumulated enough points in a season you can skip ahead, but at the risk of losing earnings from the remaining races. So you reluctantly play on despite not needing the points so you don't miss out on the cash.

Then when you get the best vehicle and have it maxed out, it becomes as easy as the opening few seasons. I maxed everything out with two seasons to go, so I didn't have to grind at the mid point as much as I thought, but I wasn't to know that at the time.

Despite that, it's good fun and I really enjoyed it.

4/5

retroking1981

Aero Fighters (SNES)

Decent port of the arcade game, which is your standard early 90s vertical shoot 'em up.

Surprisingly doesn't suffer to badly from slowdown, which tended to plague the genre on SNES, especially in the early years of the console.

Solid co-op fun but criminally short overall. Would definitely have been worthy of another point had it had more content.

3/5

retroking1981

Rushing Beat (SNES)

Hard not to enjoy a scrolling beat 'em up in co-op, but this pushed it.

Washed out graphics, completely forgettable music and a move set that most 8-Bit entries in the genre would be embarrassed to have.

It really was a dull playthrough overall, which dragged on for at least half hour to long.

But like I said, as long as they're co-op I tend to get some enjoyment from them.

2/5

Moot_Geeza

Will get some SW done today amd put the feelers out for a new game.

davyK

Always fancied RnR Racing. Good to hear it is still a good one. I hear the Biker Mice game is good too.

retroking1981

Yeah I heard the same, by Konami too.

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